


122 Days

by Defnotmeyo



Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2020-12-07 19:46:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20981366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defnotmeyo/pseuds/Defnotmeyo
Summary: He has 122 days to figure his shit out.





	1. i. Day 27

**Author's Note:**

> Fictober fun.

Cold. 

He retains only sensory memories at the beginning.

He was cold; colder than he has ever been. Dropped onto his back and god dammit that hurt.

He hurt. Everywhere. 

He fucking throbbed. 

Throbbed all over and yet his god damn memory won’t blank the feeling of the cold. 

It engulfs him. 

Mulder didn’t think it was possible to even see half the colors of the arc while being colorblind, yet alone feel them.

He will never forget the tingly feeling of his own ice blue lips.

He can remember fighting to breathe. To move his chest. To inhale. Inflate his own lungs like a fish drug to land.

He can’t. 

And then, shortly there after, the sound. At first, it echoes of someone unevenly tapping on a hollow desk. It turns cacophonous, then grows denser. A heavy rainstorm but the smacks ring of wet mud and not hail.

Only months later, in the deep end of the proverbial emotional wave pool after he awakes, does Mulder realize the sound for what it is. 

What it was.

It was the sound of dirt being poured over his coffin the day they filled his grave. 

He tried to scream. God knows, he tried.

God? What god?

_Scully, I tried to scream. I promise… I tried._


	2. ii. Day 92.

"Mulder!"

Her voice finally breaks through and his eyes fly open just in time to see himself wrench his wrist from her grasp. Just in time to stop himself as he cocks back to strike out, hit anything holding him down. 

The bedsheets are soaked and he spares a brief moment of abject humiliation at the thought he might just have pissed himself in her bed. It's sweat though, the telltale sign of the worst of his nightmares, and his skin prickles in a fever chill as it begins to cool. 

God dammit he hates being, "Cold," he mumbles and winces when Scully reaches to pull him into her. 

"Get the hell off me!" is out of his mouth before he can stop it and he's out of bed before he has to look her in the eye. 

She gives him about ten minutes before he hears her pad into the kitchen behind him, heavy and pregnant and wary as though he's just rabid enough to run. She slouches against the table beside him and traces a finger down his forearm, tapping lightly at the carpus. "Your wrists," she murmurs, voice still thick with sleep.

"Hmm?" Mulder mumbles, breathing finally starting to slow. 

"I expected your wrists to be worse. When you-" she pauses and sighs heavily. "After the hopistal, the Pinkus case, your wrists were bruised for weeks. Rubbed raw."

Mulder closes his eyes against her words. Hangs his head, ashamed. 

Scully, brave soldier, continues on, "But it was the first thing I noticed in the morgue. As battered as you were and I could tell, God, Mulder... I could tell they held you by your wrists but the bruising wasn't bad."

And it wasn't. 

She finally brings voice to her fear. "It was almost like..." even as brave as Scully is... she stops. Can't finish the thought. 

"Did you, Mulder?" she asks, voice small and broken like fragmented glass over the quiet in her kitchen. "Did you give up?"

His silence, her answer, and she closes her eyes against his truth. 

He's vaguely surprised she can ever look at him again after. 

How the hell is he supposed to fight for his child when he can't even fight for himself?

"I'm gonna be sick," Mulder slides from the chair and barely makes it to her toilet. He doesn't raise his head when he feels her ruffle the back of his hair.

"God, Mulder," her voice thick and dammit he's made her cry. "What did they do to you?"

He'll never tell. Unlike Scully, Mulder has always been cursed with a photographic memory.

Scully's abduction comes to her in flashes. Spots of white light.

Mulder, though. He remembers.

He remembers every bit.


	3. iii. Day 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: assault

He wakes up with a start, coughing, and he’s not in the chair. Thank fucking god he’s not in that damn chair.

He grimaces with the copper taste of blood and spits. The roof of his mouth is a tender mess from whatever the hell that last experiment was.

The floor of the craft, and Mulder is very sure he’s in the belly of the ship, is glassy and cool. It would be a relief on his fever burn, laying there, but Mulder curls in on himself anyway, tender all over. His spine twinges in relief as it’s finally allowed to stretch in a different direction.

The footsteps quickly tell him he’s not alone.

Mulder looks up as the man approaches from the darkened corner of the room. Forces himself to sit, then stand. If this is it, he won’t face death lying down.

“I know you,” he crosses his arms, conscious of his own nakedness.

The man in front of him is hulking, cropped hair slicked back, muscled body held in tight check as he circles Mulder. 

“Do you, Fox?” he smiles hollowly.

Mulder drops his arms and pulls himself straighter, defiant. 

The bounty hunter smiles. “She’s pregnant, you know." He continues to circle Mulder, appraising the smaller man. "I won’t keep you guessing; it’s yours.”

Mulder clinches back any words. They can kill him. He’s not going to give them an inch.

“There is of course, the question of how. Thoughts?”

At that, Mulder smirks. “Guess they don’t go over losing your virginity in Reticula, do th-”

His words are cut off by the bounty hunter’s swift backhand cracking across Mulder’s sore jaw. Mulder’s head whips around, but ears ringing, he brings himself back to full height despite the pain. “Guess not.”

The bounty hunter moves in on Mulder then, backing him into a wall Mulder didn’t even realize was there. His breath is hot, stinking on Mulder’s face when he speaks. “Save the sarcasm, Mulder. We know you don’t know how, anymore than we do.”

The bounty hunter presses into Mulder, a forearm restraining him across his chest, reaching down and grabbing Mulder’s balls in a quick, crushing squeeze. Hard enough to black Mulder’s vision, send stars behind eyes slammed shut. Hard enough for Mulder to bite down on his bottom lip and draw blood.

“But we’ll find out, Mulder." The bounty hunter smiles and steps back, slaps Mulder lightly across the wounds on his cheek. Mulder slides down the wall, cupping himself. 

These mother fuckers.

"We’ll find out.”

The bounty hunter walks from Mulder across the room, disappearing into the darkened edge.

Mulder lets go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding and stops fighting the urge to pass out..

When he wakes up, he’s back in the chair.


	4. iv. Day 82

Monster Boy, he’d called himself once, and that much had been true.

They hide in the light, they’d said, but Mulder brought that light with him, shining it into the darkest corners, Scully on his back with a shot that never failed to ring true.

He sits propped against his desk, watching from outside himself as he fails her.

The dust motes float lifelessly in the last of the morning sun and he was wrong, in the hospital. He doesn’t feel like Austin Powers. No secret or special agent here.

Here, across from her as she grasps at any straw to get through to him, Mulder realizes there is no longer an FBI man, no monster boy in this apartment. With his mottled cheeks and torn chest, there’s no Dr. Frankenstein.

All that’s left is the monster.

He wants to hate himself, with how he’s treating her. The indifference. Forcing out words he can’t bring himself to feel.

And that’s the problem. The problem is he doesn’t feel anything. He’s not scared, not angry, not sad. Not joyful, not elated, not ready to embrace a second chance.

He was terrified on that ship, in that chair. Terrified for three weeks and then buried for a month after that. Now? He doesn’t feel a thing.

If he felt anything, he’d snap back at her. She prayed, huh? Yeah well he did, too. After the beatings and after the experiments and after the god damn cold. He damn well did pray.

He prayed to die.


	5. v. Day 110

“All I had was a sheet.”

A sentence, stumbled over against the spring clap of a D.C. thunderstorm, hunkered down in her bed.

They’re both backed against her headboard, knees forming pillow-forts between their legs. Like a child, she switches the flashlight on, casting shadows around her room.

“I…” she swishes the flashlight around, changing the angles of the light as she clears her throat, “I don’t remember it all. But I remember the sheet. And my belly.”

Mulder angles his head towards her, not used to the uncharacteristic anatomical euphemism. 

“They did something, Mulder. I was bigger.”

He sighs and turns, drapes his arm across her waist like a good man should. He remembers, too. They did do something to her, when she came back with all soft curves and big breasts.

Emily, maybe.

When her grief is laid up against his own, he feels like it should mean more, shouldn’t it? In the light of day their trespasses on her seem so much greater. 

But in the dark of night…

Before he can start to feel like the biggest asshole on earth, his sailor throws him a lifering.

“Whatever they did, Mulder… you’re still you.”

The silence stretches before he decides to go through with it. His confession. “I came.”

She’d been stroking his forearm lightly but stops, turns off the flashlight. Some confessions are better in the dark.

“I came. I don’t know what they fuck they were doing to me but I came. Came til my balls hurt,” Mulder flushes in the dim light.

How embarassing. 

Scully. His partner. His protector. The one person who knows who he is.

“Well…” she clears her throat. “At least you came.”

Mulder snorts, covering his face. For the first time in days, that relentless nothing breaks, gives his heart a sharp tug.

“At least they gave you a sheet,” he mumbles, turning against her, and letting her be the big spoon. 

Maybe. Maybe, maybe maybe. Maybe he will be alright.


	6. vi.  Day 108

The days aren’t all bad.

If he’s honest, he faked it through his first Lamaze class with her, but the deep seated dread he felt when she crumpled against the sofa in pain has been the first thing to shake the nothingness in him since his return.

It knocked something loose in him, her sick like that. 

The X-files have never looked less important. 

The All-Star Break is about two months away and vaguely, Mulder realizes there is a damn good chance it will be the first time he’s able to watch it with his son.

Or daughter. 

Either way, he’s going to make sure they’re Roger Clemens fans. The pitcher hasn’t looked this good in years. But the only jerseys allowed in his house are Jeter and Posada, because pop flies, fast balls, and homeruns steal the show, but infield play wins playoff games.

Scully’s hand is scratching lightly between his pecs and he slides down further into her couch to the serenade of another satisfying whiff of the bat, the ball popping swiftly into Posada’s mitt. Clemens is on fire.

“Kid’s gonna look good in Yankees gear,” he thinks aloud, and tries to eat his words for a second when her hand stops.

There’s a heavy minute of silence shattered by another whap of the bat, and she slowly resumes ruffling her hand across his chest. 

“Bill already bought her a Padres onesie...”

“Fuck Bill,” he snorts and pinches her hip at that, threatens to go for that spot he knows that tickles, and she gets in a good slap at him before he relents and goes easy. She did just get out of the hospital.

It’s an alarmingly warm, normal, sunny afternoon.

“Her?” he asks, tentative.

Scully shrugs with a small grin, swipes her index finger affectionally down his nose, booping him on the end. “Or him.”

The silence is lighter than it’s been since he came back. Maybe since it’s been in years.

“The Padres suck, Scully.”

“Clemens is juicing,” she whispers.

Mulder pokes her again, sighs, and settles back into the couch to watch the rest of the game.


	7. vii.  Day 110

The days aren’t all good, either. 

Mulder doesn’t know if he has two weeks or a month, but at some point very, very soon he is going to be a father.

And Scully is…

She expects so much of him.

So much more than he’s ever expected of himself.

He’s gutted his apartment. A victim of circumstance, most of his things. Thunder and lightening and the bursting of a transformer had sent him from rough sleep into a fit. And unlike when he was on the ship, his wrists and ankles were free. 

Mulder tore through his house, fighting anything that lurked in the shadows.

He hasn’t slept alone since, and if Mulder is perfectly honest, it’s mostly because he’s more afraid of himself than the dark.

Fear though, fear is good and he embraces it. It’s a feeling, at least, and he doesn’t feel a whole lot these days.

He was afraid, jumping from that oil derrick. Scared shitless.

And in the first moments, fighting the undertow created by the sinking, he almost damn near let go.

“It’s the last thing you remember,” Scully had said once, “before you drown. My father said you never forget it if you manage to make it out.”

The taste of salt water.

And he doesn’t.

In the moments before the whop whop whop of the Coast Guard’s helicopter blades register, before the rescue swimmer gets there, and as he’s out to sea, Mulder thinks, ‘I could. I could drown this way just fine.’ 

He could just let the ocean take him. 

Why the hell not? 

Everything else in his fucking life has. Taken him, that is.

When he wakes up in the hospital, he’s a man without a job and a man without the truth. 

He’s got two weeks, maybe, before he’s a father.

Fuck being a father. Fuck being a partner, too.

Mulder doesn’t even feel like a man.

He’s got two weeks, if that, and all Mulder feels, tastes, smells… is the salt.


	8. viii. Day 24

There’s an incessant drone.

A hum.

He let a man drill into his head once. A ketamine flush.

The sound is damn near the same.

Pulled apart, stuck like a rotisserie. They might not cook him, but they will surely kill him.

He screamed her name til his vocal chords bled dry.

His ass hurts, Mulder thinks numbly. If they were going to retrofit a spaceship to zoom around the exosphere, he figures they could have at least provided padded seats.

Dimly, he smirks at the notion of lowest bidders and government contracts and cuts.

These aren’t aliens. No sir, no sirree.

If Mulder is sure of anything, he’s sure of that. The bounty hunter may be other worldly, but there’s nothing alien about the crimes they’ve wrought on him.

With a top secret clearance, he should know.

Whatever brain surgery they’ve decided on today, they’ve finally stop and he’s left naked in that god damned chair.

Today he has a visitor.

“We’re about done here, Agent,” the bounty hunter stalks his way.

All Mulder can do is grunt. He’s sweaty. Piss soaked. And while they apparently don’t give a damn about urine, the feeling near his prostate is a stark reminder of why he still hasn’t felt the need to shit.

He hopes they have curved graves. He’s been in the chair so god damn long they won’t be able to straighten his corpse. Ideally, he thinks distantly, they’ll just dump him in the god damn woods like every other body and the wolves will see to him before Scully has to.

She’s out there, after all. He knows.

With her pants stretched a little too tight, pregnant and with his, all he can think is, “Will, Scully. If I were there, I’d want to call him Will.”

The bounty hunter moves in. “We still don’t know, you know?” He slides his hand up Mulder’s leg, pinches the tip of his limp penis, laid soft and bruised on the crease of his thigh.

Mulder doesn’t even have it in him to wince.

“A perfect child, Agent Mulder. And we have no idea how.”

From the last dredges of his energy, the last of his life, Mulder spits at the bounty hunter’s feet. “Fuck. You.”

“We’ll figure it out. You’re useless, but your child isn’t.”

He can’t find the breath to scream.

He’s falling. Falling and falling hard. The ground beneath him squelches when he hits and he almost throws up before blacking out.

They won’t touch her, or that kid, he vows as his vision blacks. They won’t fucking even come close. He’ll fight until the day he-

“How bad is he? How bad is he hurt?”

_Bad, Scully. I’m hurt real bad._

“No. No. No. No.”

_I’m trying. I am._

“He needs help!”

_Get her out of here, god dammit._

“It’s too late.”

_Yeah… yeah. Not for the kid though. Not for the kid._

“He needs help!”

_Scully…_

“Agent Scully…”

_Scully, Scully. You can’t save me now._

Skinner’s voice. “Christ. Cover him up.”

_This isn’t happening. This is not happening._


	9. ix. Day 112

“How about that little Italian place?” he asks, but it’s half hearted.

“Fox Mulder…”

And he ignores the little twinge at his first name. He likes it when she says Fox. God dammit does he like it.

“As I live and breathe, are you trying to ask me out on a date?”

Mulder shuffles and shrugs, all leather jacket and limbs and hair that’s getting just a little too long.

“Maybe.”

Scully snorts as she dips her head, and he wants to kiss her. Always. Usually.

“The king and queen of putting the cart before the horse.”

But she waddles to her room to change.

Dinner isn’t fun.

It’s awkward. Stilted conversation and he’s trying. He really, really is trying. She doesn’t judge him when he orders the vino and so he doesn’t stop drinking it.

Some days, hell most days, he wishes he could go back.

They were superheroes; fighting and thrashing and facing the world with the other at their hip. Scully was his sidearm; the guarantee to his case. His protector, his first line defender. With Mulder against the world, Scully was his coach in the corner.

Rocky never won a fight without Mickey.

The clock ticks on.

He’ll be a father in two weeks or less and he still can’t bring himself to tell her it’s more than slightly uncomfortable these days for her to ride him while he sits up. Not that there is much riding to begin with, but Mulder doesn’t think he’ll feel comfortable with cowgirl ever again.

That god damn chair.

Be a father? Fat chance.

Mulder can barely be a man.

“You don’t have to do this,” her voice breaks the quiet of the night.

“Mmm?”

“Faking your way.”

Scully has always been his harshest… and most compassionate… judge.

“I’m as afraid of this as you.” She can’t bring herself to look at him, and he can’t bring himself to face her.

Mulder turns then, buries himself in the pocket of her collarbone, and snuffles with his hand tight across her prominent waist. There’s a soft kick against his forearm, and he digs in deeper.

“I love him,” he confesses, and neither of them dwell on Mulder’s inside scoop on the baby’s sex. “I do. And I love you.”

“You love an idea,” she voices.

And he does, doesn’t he? He always has.

It’s quiet for minutes before she breaks the silence. “Thank you. For tonight. It was nice.”

“Yeah, it was nice.”

Two weeks. If that. Less than a month, for sure. He’s going to be a father and he can barely take the mother of his child out on a date.

It was nice.


	10. v. Day 121 into 122

Knifed and shot. Scarred and riddled. Bullet ridden and still chasing monsters with a butterfly net.

Mulder’s been through it all. He’s been an agent of the government, a hand of the law. Skinner’s Monster Boy and Patterson’s Right Hand Man. Kersh’s headache, the bane of Bill Scully Jr.’s existence, and whether she’s looking at him in pity, anger, or fear, he’s pretty sure Margaret Scully wishes he’d never come into her daughter’s life.

An abductee and a kidnapper. A prisoner, held by the United States and by Russia and still a free man. He’s been dead and alive, he thinks. A man in a coffin and a coffin of a man because half the time Mulder feels as empty as his grave.

Flashbacks? Sure, he’s got them. And it’s a damn good thing he’ll never have to qualify at the range again because while his shot still rings true, the flashing red light to signal they’re hot still threatens to trip him back to the ship.

He’s kicked out of her apartment for the baby shower, and for that he’s glad. Scully doesn’t know any of those people and it’s better she doesn’t have to introduce them to a ghost.

Mulder’s moved in with her, more or less, but he still knocks on her door for entry. Still whisks her away into the night. 

When he sends her off, away to bear her child, all he can think is, “I just sent away my son.” The phantom of Bill Mulder looms large. The smoke of CGB Spender looms larger.

“What do I tell this child?” he’d thought to himself, tossing and turning and trying to slam shut his droll monologue in his bastard of a brain.

Mulder thought maybe he’d have another couple of weeks, but Billy Miles ensures he’s only got a couple of days. 

Hell.

Hours if that.

Is Skinner with him or against him and at this point, does it matter one damn bit?

One hundred and twenty-two days, Mulder thinks, as he tries to do anything to keep himself occupied in the helicopter. 

She was pregnant the day he went missing. The day he gave himself up. The day they threw him in that god damn chair and treated him like a lab rat. Pulled him apart and put him back together over and over again.

Invaded him, let him piss himself, held him hostage. Tortured, experimented, and yes, yes he can admit it now. Raped him. Medically, by proxy, it doesn’t really matter. He’s got to own it because over a hundred days has dwindled to minutes and seconds before he really needs to have his shit together.

They’re close. Close enough to consider landing soon. The pilot doesn’t think twice after Mulder holds a gun to him. 

There’s blood everywhere once he steps inside and yes, yes she does absolutely need to get to the hospital.

It’s not the first time he’s been awash in her blood, but Mulder swears in that house it will be the last.

“Scully…” he starts gathering what he can, what the helo can hold. 

“Look at him Mulder,” and her words are slurred, slurred as she starts to go. “Our son.”

“Ours, Scully,” Mulder grits out, scoops them together, and takes them home.


End file.
